13 May 2014

Review: NZSO presents "Hear and Far"

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra

James MacMillan, conductor

10 May 2014, Auckland Town Hall

Review by Alex Taylor

As a lover and advocate of contemporary music, I have found
the NZSO’s last two ventures – ostensibly efforts to integrate the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries into their programming – a hard slog. Last week’s We
Remember was a dreary attempt to correlate pretty, slow music with profundity
and remembrance. This Week’s Hear & Far (sic.) was even more deluded in
forcing the “Scottish connection” between Lyell Cresswell and James MacMillan.
There were no musical reasons for this pairing – contrasting works can be highly
effective, but the grandeur of MacMillan’s language brooks no opposition. Despite
– perhaps because of – the exquisite economy of the Cresswell, the concert came
across as a lopsided offering to the gods of Wagnerian excess and
self-indulgence.

What these programmes have done, nevertheless, is show the
quality of the New Zealand works and the composers who wrote them. Last week Jack
Body’s Little Elegies was fiercely confronting while maintaining a deft
lightness of touch. And Lyell Cresswell continues to show he is one of our most
original composers – his other orchestral works deserve a wider hearing in New
Zealand. But the inane programming and non-sequitur marketing (jewelled hairless
cats, anyone?) have only succeeded in putting off potential audience members,
and confounding those who do turn up.

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Lyell Cresswell makes no concessions to his audience. The Clock Stops stripped back the
orchestral canvas to its doom-laden skeleton: the kakapo booms of the bass
clarinet, a juddering mass of hammer-on pizzicati, the unnervingly high-tensile
combination of high timpani and harp. The listener gets none of the immediate
lushness that might be expected, but instead has to draw his or her own
connections between finely etched gestures and sharp transformations of colour
and texture. Cresswell’s high-wire orchestration act was all the more
spectacular for its sensitivity to the vocal line. Despite baritone Jonathan
Lemalu’s limited dynamic range due to a viral infection, the orchestra rarely
smothered the singer. However his smoothness of tone and propensity for
swallowing consonants meant that even in the sparsest passages the words were
not always clear. While Lemalu is one of
our very finest singers, I felt that Cresswell’s vocal writing, often concise
to the point of terseness, required a different approach.

The work teemed with powerful moments: the energetic swoop
of strings to answer “a woman waking”; the penetrating beam of unison trumpets
and horns; the usually-comic vibraslap shading monolithic tutti chords with a
startling death rattle. The NZSO displayed a characteristically fine attention
to detail and the brass in particular were impressively synchronous. Lemalu’s
wordless lament near the end of the work was intimate and understated, drawing
us down to the bottom of the singer’s range, echoing the starkness of the
opening bass clarinet solo.

But too often Fiona Farrell’s text with its tangential
wordplay jarred against the velvety seriousness of Lemalu’s baritone. The
moments of comedic lightness felt cringingly “hip”, with descriptions of young
skaters “riding the rubble” and a city that “rocked [and] rolled”. These were
literary excursions to more concrete poetic genres that undercut the narrative
and translated poorly to the operatic voice. Nevertheless Farrell accumulated a
wealth of historical and contemporary references, from Jericho to Christchurch,
giving the work a strong sense of context and dynamism.

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Where Cresswell focused his attention inwards to orchestral
minutiae, James MacMillan’s music was directed firmly outwards, a grand public façade
replete with all the clichés of the genre, from Berlioz to John Williams via
Stravinsky and Holst. Trombones for every occasion. MacMillan’s first offering,
“Woman of the Apocalypse” seemed dedicated to excess, although in between
Wagnerian tidbits there was a lot of meandering, filling time before the next
bout of chest-beating. Despite the massive orchestration, the music seemed
constrained, continually forced in unnatural harmonic directions. Personally I
felt like I was being shouted at every so often – this is music that leaves
nothing to the imagination: a polemic, a diatribe of Romantic proportions. Where
Cresswell opened up formal and registral space, MacMillan herded us and the
orchestra into an elevator and locked the doors.

While there were superficial similarities between this work
and “The Confession of Isobel Gowdie”, my experience of the latter piece was
very different. Where the first piece felt like a patchwork of musical stunts,
the second had an inexorable arch that was altogether more compelling. I was
swept up in its gradual saturation of texture, in its inevitable structure,
from the sinuous modal opening to the singular crescendo that ends the work. While
some gestures seemed careless in comparison to Cresswell’s finely etched score,
the longer form was brilliantly executed – the music was allowed to follow its
own trajectory. The desperate plaintiveness of the violas perhaps best summed
up the spirit of the work, a lyricism that when pushed too far becomes cloying
and aggressive. Here that lyricism was judged sensitively, but earlier I would
have quite liked four and a half minutes of the Auckland Town Hall’s noisy air conditioning
to stand in for the woman of the apocalypse.